Posts Tagged ‘schools’

I was discussing various safety measures with a friend who is a principal. The thought occurred to me: If the cops went into the school, it would be best to launch into door nooks and behind lockers as they made their way into position to take out the shooter. Well, maybe they should know the layout of the school. You know what, they should run test runs over the summer so that they are familiar with the game plan and the layout. And then I had a realization:

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE RARE AS ____.

Sorry. They are. We have over 100,000 public schools in America. We have over a hundred million weapons. We have a handful of school shootings and most of those are targeted (ex-husband killing wife who is a teacher, kid shooting his bully, spurned lover, etc) not mass shootings like Parkland.

Let’s assume that we go with one security guard per school (which would be overkill in some schools and pathetic in others). If we paid that security guard $30,000 a year, that would mean a cost to the taxpayers of $3,000,000 per year.

It’s rare, but let’s assume that every year 50 school kids (way overstated) are killed in these attacks. Let’s assume that having these security guards shuts down any attempt to attack the kids (way overstated, I’m sure it’d only cut deaths 90% at best, but still). So that means for a MERE $60,000,000 a year, we can save one child.

That’s…well, that’s pathetic. Bear in mind that if you used $3,000,000 in food programs, medical treatment, water treatment, or a host of other areas, you could have a much greater impact.

Every choice is a cost benefit analysis. I hate to say it, but Trump is right. The only cost effective measure you can adopt is to allow teachers with CCWs to carry. Anything else blows the cost benefit analysis and we are better off just accepting that these rare, tragic events are going to happen from time to time.

Let’s remember how rare these attacks are before we do anything stupid.